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Food, Glorious Food!!!

Oh food! Wonderful food! Marvelous food! Glorious fooooooood!! (Thank you St. Basil’s Catholic Elementary School circa nineteen eighty-something for putting that song in my head forever)

Now that I have your attention! Hi! Remember us? We haven’t left you. We’re still here. It’s been a while though, and for that I must apologize. Sorry to have left you hanging for six months. That wasn’t very nice of us. But things have gotten a bit busy in our household. How have you been? I see you grew your hair out. It looks nice. I’ve missed you. I had forgotten how much you smile when you get compliments. You should smile more often, it brightens up the room.

To start with, as you will note from the picture, we are singing the praises of food! Why? Well I am glad you asked. Pepper has started the Ketogenic Diet! To be fair, she started the diet at the end of May, but since that time, we have been so busy, and so focused on putting our efforts into making this diet work, that we have had little time for anything else. Remember that time you tried the Atkins Diet, or the Cabbage Soup Diet (ew), or Weight Watchers? Remember how diligent you were with checking labels, and making meals, and measuring your food just so? Well, multiply that by six meals a day, every day since the last week of may and you’ll understand a little where we are coming from. It’s been tough. There have been late nights roasting chicken, and cooking broccoli. There have been early mornings, cutting up watermelon and measuring, weighing and packaging up meals. It’s been a labor of love and it has been very eye opening.

You know the saying it takes a village to raise a child? Well it takes a galley kitchen to prepare one of these meals. It’s a lot of work. But hard work or not, we have seen some dramatic results! While I cannot report a complete disappearance of her seizures, Pepper’s seizures have become less frequent and less intense. We even had a period of three glorious seizure-free weeks! I repeat – THREE WEEKS WITHOUT A SEIZURE! Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout at you, but hey, I might as well shout it from the rooftops. The most amazing change we have seen in Pepper, aside from the seizure control is that she has become more cognitively alert. She’s engaged and alert, and wants to participate. She’s not exactly doing cartwheels in the living room, or even saying mama again, but she’s watching, she’s connecting, she’s in there!

I should explain. Prior to starting the Ketogenic Diet, Pepper was starting to lose some of her skills. She stopped saying mama. She stopped saying dada. She even stopped saying da. Her muscle mass started to diminish, and we were starting to lose her. She hasn’t regained her words, but she’s definitely perked up. We still don’t know if she will ever walk, but she’s certainly trying. She moves in circles on the floor, she pulls herself up to grab things off coffee tables and chairs. She even gets into mischief sometimes. What am I saying? She gets into mischief a lot! I am not sure how easy it is for you to imagine this crazy roller coaster we are on. The ups, the downs. The fight, and most depressingly, the flight. But, thank you for following, and attempting to understand. It’s very difficult to lose the friends you thought you would grow old with because of something you have zero control over.

We have become the haunted house on the street. The closed shutters. The people only rarely seen. The people you catch a glimpse of exiting the house early in the morning and returning late at night. We have been up, and we have been down. We’ve been feasting on our own company, and preparing our daily meals. Food! Glorious Food!!